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A leaked memo by a top Facebook executive justifying the firm's controversial data practices has caused outrage at the company's headquarters. More than 3,000 Facebook employees have reacted to an internal post about the memo by vice president of consumer hardware, Andrew Bosworth. In the memo, Bosworth gives a candid look into how far the technology giant is willing to go in order to become the world's most popular social media platform. He admits that the firm engages in 'questionable contact importing practices' but claims it is worth it even if it 'costs someone a life.'

Dylan Curran downloaded all of the data stored on him by Facebook and Google Google's data archive was almost ten times larger than scandal hit Facebook's It dated back to 2008 and revealed a level of detail that shocked the IT expert He laid out the extent of the private information held on him in a series of tweets Facebook has hit the headlines in recent weeks over its handling of your private data, and now the shocking extent of information held by Google has been revealed. In a series of tweets, one IT expert has laid out exactly what...

CEO criticizes monetization of customers’ personal information Cook says the time for self-regulation is past Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, issued a harsh rebuke of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s business model on Wednesday, saying that detailed profiles of individuals compiled by internet platforms should not exist. Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you Dylan Curran Read more “We could make a ton of money if we monetized our customers, if our customers were our product,” Cook said in an interview with Recode and MSNBC that will air on 6 April. “We’ve elected not...

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is reportedly launching an investigation into Facebook over whether it violated terms of consent in the wake of reports a data firm harvested information from millions of profiles. Bloomberg News reported Tuesday that the investigation relates to whether Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica, the data firm used by the Trump campaign, to obtain some Facebook users’ personal data in violation of its policies.

RUSH: What has taken the place of McCabe now — and this is where you are really at the right place today — Facebook and Cambridge analytics, the Drive-Bys and the left are all over this. When you hear Cambridge analytics, you need to think Mercers. The Mercers own Cambridge analytics. What they’re trying to tell everybody is that Cambridge analytics hacked or cheated or gamed Facebook and ended up collecting very personal data on 50 million Americans who participated in a survey that Cambridge analytics conducted on Facebook. And so you are being told that Facebook has been victimized,...

"It was suspected that a harsh drought from about 2000 to 2010 that killed tens of thousands of livestock was unprecedented in the region’s history and primarily the result of human-caused climate change. But the tree ring data show that the dry spell, while rare in its severity, was not outside the realm of natural climate variability, researchers report online March 14 in Science Advances."

First, 2016 was the worst year for the Russian rocket industry in decades...Second, China has been aggressively ramping up its launch rate, and in 2016 moved clearly into the top tier of space-faring nations...Third, the United States is clearly transitioning away from a government owned and operated rocket industry to one owned and operated by the private sector. Since the retirement of the Space Shuttle, the federal government has not launched a single rocket that it designed, built, and owns. Instead, every payload put in space by the U.S. has been put there by a private sector rocket.

We have Exede satellite providing Internet service. For the last 2 months they say we have used up our 10GB data allowance in 3 days or less. This month we used it all up in less than 24 hours. We streamed a one hour serial show on low resolution on our LG smart tv, and used the Internet for email. I also spent an hour or two on FR. Exede claimed we had used the entire 10GB. We've had this service for 1.5 years and our online behavior has not changed. This location is a getaway home and we visit...

**SNIP** Harold Martin is scheduled to plead guilty to one count of willful retention of national defense information on January 22 in a federal court in Baltimore, according to court filings, Reuters reported. Prosecutors said that the ex-NSA contractor spent two decades taking classified government information from the U.S. intelligence community and hoarded the secrets at his home in Maryland. The Justice Department accused Martin in 2016 of a “breathtaking” theft of government secrets. During a raid of his home, authorities seized dozens of laptops and digital devices in addition to six full bankers’ boxes worth of documents.

Who were your ancestors? What is your ethnic background composed of? Sites like Ancestry.com and 23andme have always been some go to sources in answering all of your toughest questions. But how accurate are they? In a recent interview with Cracked, one of the major ancestry testing companies, (which specific company is unknown) spilled the beans on what really happens when you purchase an ancestry kit. While I can’t say I’m surprised, you may be shocked to learn that these ancestry sites aren’t always as accurate as they claim to be. Beyond this, they’ve also admitted to tampering with the...

Firefighters have been working nonstop to put out multiple wildfires ravaging land and homes from the hills to the beaches of Southern California. High above the flames and smoke, heavy duty materiel is helping them better battle those blazes. In a partnership between state fire protection agency CAL FIRE and the California Air National Guard, unmanned drones have been assisting firefighters by relaying information that those on the ground could not otherwise get. The MQ-9 Reapers that were deployed this week have sensors that can see through smoke and feed back live video to the fire command. “We can show [firefighters]...

For years Americans' right to privacy, as granted by the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, has come under threat as the country's surveillance systems have grown. After intelligence leaks by former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden, however, the NSA's domestic dragnet is finally getting the attention that many people feel it deserves.

Share this on LinkedIn Print this article Email this article Increase size Amazon Web Services has a new market for its cloud computing, analytics, and storage services. This week, the Defense Department granted the cloud computing giant a provisional authorization to host Impact Level 5 workloads, which are the military and Pentagon’s most sensitive, unclassified information. “This further bolsters AWS as an industry leader in helping support the DoD’s critical mission in protecting our security,” the company said in a statement. “The AWS services support a variety of DoD workloads, including workloads containing sensitive controlled unclassified information and National Security...

A lesson from the Equifax data breach – in the cyber security realm, we look at networks as falling into two categories: those that have been breached, and those that are going to get breached. It is clear for all Americans to see now, that the same is true of personal information, too. Either your personal information has been leaked, or it is going to get leaked. Whether its Target, OPM (Office of Personnel Management), or Equifax – neither the government or corporations can protect individual privacy — at least not with the existing American system built upon the stone-aged...

One common response to the news that a Kremlin-linked online operation in Russia bought $100,000 worth of Facebook ads during the 2016 election campaign has been that the money is a drop in the bucket relative to the more than $1 billion spent on ads during the cycle, or the $27 billion in revenue earned by Facebook last year. But as one of a handful of Americans who managed the digital operations of a 2016 presidential campaign, I think $100,000 smartly spent on Facebook could have a much larger reach than you may realize. And more importantly, nobody — not...

It's no secret that the economy is changing. As technology plays a greater role in our personal and professional lives, our economy too increasingly relies on technology to create jobs and encourage growth. Technology is the foundation of our digital economy, and its modern infrastructure is data. However, in order to use data, we need a place to process and store it - in other words, data centers. Data centers are facilities that house the computers that process data. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, there are three million data centers across the country - including here in Alabama....

Sensitive personal details relating to almost 200 million US citizens have been accidentally exposed by a marketing firm contracted by the Republican National Committee. The 1.1 terabytes of data includes birthdates, home addresses, telephone numbers and political views of nearly 62% of the entire US population. The data was available on a publicly accessible Amazon cloud server. Anyone could access the data as long as they had a link to it.

As a former lawyer, Garth Lagerwey knows about the value of evidence-based reasoning. Now he's trying to apply that same line of thinking to the professional soccer club he helps manage. Lagerwey spoke about this philosophy at the Sounders Sports Science Weekend in Seattle, an event that focuses on the latest innovations in sports science and analytics. The Sounders have long been pioneers, at least among Major League Soccer teams, in using sports science to help make on-field improvements. The club, which won its first MLS Cup last year, utilizes a variety of gadgets like GPS trackers and heart rate...

Over the past few months, the story of the Awan brothers has been largely ignored by mainstream media. However, the brothers Abid, Imran, and Jamal Awan are at the center of a criminal investigation by U.S. Capital Hill Police. The Awan brothers were Pakistani IT specialists, whom worked for more than 30 house and senate democrats, as well as Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The substantial scandal has raised questions about who may have been passed data which the Awans had access to, given Pakistan’s history of collaborating with a number of foreign countries who have demonstrated past willingness to influence...

The May 1 issue of The Weekly Standard led its “Scrapbook” section with a nice dig at Politico for a story last September touting the strategic genius who mined data for the er, President Hillary campaign. The headline was "Clinton's Towering Fiasco." Elan Kriegel’s “erasable marker scribblings reminiscent of A Beautiful Mind that amount to some of the earliest drafts of the computer algorithms that underlie nearly all of the Clinton campaign’s most important strategic decisions.” They didn’t mock Politico’s Shane Goldmacher by name, but did enjoy the sound of his beautiful-mind gush back then: To understand Kriegel’s role is...